Virgin is the kind of album that makes you realize something you hadn't really before: until now, Lorde was operating at an emotional distance. Even on her beloved sophomore record Melodrama, which has become a revered magnum opus in the catalogue of teenage heartbreak. Even in the timeless, nostalgic wisdom of a song like "Ribs," penned when she was just 17. Lorde has always been in control of the narrative ("Give them nothing personal / So I'm not affected," she reflects on "Shapeshifter," a spiritual successor to Taylor Swift's "mirrorball"); she's never been this uncomfortably honest before. Following the return to nature of 2021's Solar Power, her fourth studio album sees the pop star casting aside a fear of being cringe — which makes the current backlash she's facing over some interview comments, including admitting to have watched Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee's sex tape in its entirety, which she refers to on "Current Affairs," especially ironic — in the pursuit of full transparency. A very literal translation of this modus operandi appears in Virgin's artwork, an x-ray of her pelvis: an inherent promise to strip herself down to the bone, no matter the ways in which the osseous matter might jut out in skeletal grotesqueness. On Melodrama, Lorde was actively trying to make her pain beautiful — as we often do, especially as teenagers. Can't you imagine posting a Photobooth selfie on Tumblr, crying into your vampy MAC lipstick with "Liability" on loop in the background, thinking you were being so poetic? On Virgin, she finds us in a place where she's struggling to bear witness, covering up the mirrors ("What Was That") because she's not ready to see what's become of her yet. Then, she wants to punch the reflection ("Broken Glass"), knowing the superstition-laced misfortune of having to deal with the shards and thinking it still might be worth it. Virgin feels like a rebirth. Lorde says it was written in blood, and it feels fittingly messy, ugly, full of sharp edges and contradictions, as well as repeated motifs and thought patterns. "I'm ready to feel like I don't have the answers," the pop star muses on the simmering opening track "Hammer," exemplifying the stream-of-consciousness approach she took to writing the lyrics (she occasionally casts words aside entirely in favour of layers of vocables). Some of the places this takes her are breath-stealing: "You tasted my underwear / I knew we were fucked," she sings on "Current Affairs," sidling through the line until landing the emphasis on the final syllable; "When you're holding a hammer, everything looks like a nail" on "Hammer"; "For every door you open / There's a room I can't go in" on "Favourite Daughter." Other places are far clunkier — "Mystique is dead / Last year was bad," she announces plainly at the top of "Broken Glass" — but still expand the dioramic inner world Lorde is letting us into on the record, even when her vocoder-coated moans veer toward grisliness on "Clearblue."  And we can't experience (re)birth without the one who brought us into this world, making Lorde's mother, perhaps surprisingly, a central figure on Virgin." Favourite Daughter" makes it clear that there's an element to Lorde's fame that she feels is something she's done for her mom, allowing her to live vicariously as the singer-songwriter follows her dreams to great success. However, at the same time, she feels like she's doing it all for her mom's approval: "You had a brother / I look like him / You told us as kids / He died of a broken heart," Lorde remembers of her inherited legacy. On "Clearblue," she admits that there was "broken blood" passed down to her from her mother, who came into the generational trauma from her own mother." My bed is on fire / Mama, I'm so scared," Lorde sings directly to her mom with the conviction of a prayer on the undeniable mid-album highlight "Current Affairs," as elasticized bass stabs swell with morose, coming-of-age movie synths, building to the most satisfying climax on the record. "Were you ever like this / Once you went out on the edge?" Then, on "GRWM," she begins to own it, repeating as a grounding mantra over the clangorous gurgle of Jim-E Stack's back-to-basics, hip-hop indebted production: "Wide hips, soft lips / My mama's trauma." Unfortunately, as they say, the body does keep the score, and many of us have work through rewiring our connection to it in light of that trauma. "'Girl, you walk like a bitch' / When I was 10, someone said that," Lorde revealed in her pop emergency-inducing feature on Charli XCX's "Girl, so confusing" remix — Exclaim!'s Best Song of 2024 — last year. For the singer-songwriter, the process of newly embodying herself this way has involved healing from an eating disorder, MDMA therapy and questioning her gender identity." Some days I'm a woman / Some days I'm a man," she intones on "Hammer," as if it's the most obvious thing in the world. Elsewhere, on "Man of the Year," she wonders, "Who's gonna love me like this?" It all amounts to the feeling of a total young adulthood exorcism, which isn't without the euphoric highs of the moments when self-determination emerges: "I'm a mystic / I swim in waters / That would drown so many other bitches," Lorde asserts with what can only be described as bona fide swag before cribbing Baby Bash's "Suga Suga" on "If She Could See Me Now." (She's kind of like a prettier Jesus!)"Tell it to 'em," are the last works she utters on closing track "David," harkening back to the beginning of Melodrama's "Hard Feelings/Loveless" after name-dropping Pure Heroine in a full-circle moment. Here, she's managing to hold two conflicting truths, integrating who she once was with who she's become — and becoming — now. While she's always told it, she's never told it to us quite as decidedly un-slant as she does on Virgin. The titular word, as well as the concept of virginity, sink in to me with an immediate pang of unease; a social construct that we all have to grapple with in our own way, and an experience that often leaves us feeling more unchanged than the build-up suggests. (Much of the music here lands similarly, with ample anticipation only to create space to serve the reflection that follows.) But for Lorde, it's an opportunity to reclaim something she thought she had lost long ago, but has always been within her: her true self.